Wednesday 4 February 2015

Nick of Time



The adventure of late has been finding time to do everything.

Atholl Brose

I rang in Hogmanay with some homemade Atholl Brose, a fine drink made from cheap bar Scotch, in which one soaks steel-cut oats, filter out the fibre, then add cream and honey.

After which, I promptly returned my nose to the grindstone to crank out a number of residency applications: I'm not sure what the summer and fall hold, but I'm determined to be somewhere that is not Calgary for as much of it as possible.

Plus in the middle of writing all sorts of artspeak about why I want to "make like a hockey player and get the puck out of town," I undertook a 15-day writing challenge. There were days I didn't have time to write creatively, between the residencies and drudgeful boringness of my part-time day gig, which I made up for in manic writing binges, cramming three days' worth of challenges into four or five hours' worth of, of, of, well, something.

Some of it was beyond difficult, sending me to sit in front of my computer, sobbing hysterically: other times, it was looking to convey the most honest expression with a minimum of words: my record was taking the challenge to use three specific words and create a haiku that used only twelve. It was, overall, a lot of fun.

Ghost Balls in the wind

It's been a strange winter here so far, with big dumps of snow interrupted with long stretches of chinooks: when I took the long exposure above, there was enough breeze to wobble the balls ever so slightly in the trees next door, although not the branches they were hanging from.

Wee Bairn Haggis

And I had a proper Burns supper this year, with my wee bairn haggis from MacEwan's Meats, a fine, traditional, local butcher shop. I got a good dinner's worth, and four lovely leftover dinners, out of this somewhat-enlarged softball of oats, offal, and spices.

With good single-malt.

Always.

Mwah!

Adding a bit of colour to the festivities was the blooming of my amaryllis, planted on Hallowe'en. It didn't last as long as I hoped, but it makes me smile anyway.

Books for Sale

The shop is currently empty.